Wichita threatens church for not ousting homeless from empty parking lot at Christmas | Opinion

Here’s one that makes you shake your head: the city of Wichita threatening to file criminal charges against a church for failing to chase the homeless out of a vacant parking lot at Christmastime.

The threat letter’s stamped “FINAL NOTICE” in big red type and directs the First United Methodist Church downtown to remove homeless people and their belongings from a church-owned parking lot at 325 N. Emporia. It specifically cites “clothes, camping equipment, unidentifiable junk, unidentifiable junk under tarps and in tents, furniture (and) household-type items.”

If the church doesn’t comply, it “may result in criminal charges being filed against you, requiring your appearance in court,” the letter said.

I have to say it would certainly be interesting to see how the city would propose to arrest a church.

But the reality is City Hall would just send in some of its ridiculously overpriced contractors to throw out the homeless people’s possessions and stick the church with the bill.

The church’s senior pastor, the Rev. Amy Lippoldt, said people set up camp in the church’s seldom-used overflow parking lot, a block east of the church, during the week before Christmas. It started shortly after police displaced them from sidewalks and landscaped strips along Topeka Street.

Lippoldt said she got a complaint about the impromptu campground on the Friday before Christmas from the owner of a nearby apartment building.

But she said she couldn’t bring herself to uproot struggling people when on Christmas Eve, “I’m going to preach about the baby Jesus, who had no place to lay his head.”

She called the landlord back and said the church would take care of it after New Year’s, but apparently that wasn’t good enough, because the threat letter from the city is dated Dec. 29.

Lippoldt said she sympathizes with the landlord’s concern. Tenants get scared when there’s an encampment across the street and it makes it hard to rent vacant apartments.

“I knew we were going to have to (remove the campsite), but I could not muster myself to do it two days before Christmas,” she said. “So I paid a consequence, which is a letter from the city and upset neighbors.”

The church plans to have the parking lot cleared by Monday.

It’s not a small job.

“They (police) will move the people on, but the stuff is up to us to move,” Lippoldt said. “They’ll take some of their stuff, but they won’t take everything. We can’t put that stuff in our dumpster, because it will come right back out that night. For us, cleaning up means we have to get a trailer, we have to put all that stuff in there and we have to go to the dump.”

Complicating matters is there’s a constant inflow of new stuff.

Well-meaning people gather up their used clothing, blankets, camping gear and miscellaneous household items and head downtown to try to do their part to help the homeless.

First Church pleads with them to work through organizations so their stuff gets handed out in an orderly fashion, but it seldom works that way, Lippoldt said.

More often, the donors get huffy and accuse the church of failing to show Christian compassion when they’re asked not to run impromptu giveaways on church property — which the city has advised the church not to do.

“It happens like weekly, that people come down and try to give away stuff on our block,” Lippoldt said. “And we have to say ‘Please don’t use our parking lot for that.’ And we get yelled at.”

As for the people in the Emporia Street parking lot, “Maybe they’ll move over next to the Episcopal lot on Third Street, or maybe they’ll go further, a couple more blocks, but they’re not going to go far,” Lippoldt said. “I’ll probably see those same tents.”

She’s right.

My own office is about three blocks east of the church in the Old Town square, and I’m sure I’ll see the tents too. I’ve been seeing them for years.

The homeless used to mainly congregate in Nafztger Park, about a block from our previous Eagle office on Douglas.

But when the park was rebuilt in 2020 to foster upscale commercial and apartment developments, the homeless had to go. They moved to a handful of city blocks in the area around Second and Topeka streets, where they’ve been ever since.

Naftzger was always an uneasy coexistence. Downtown’s upright citizens complained of panhandling, outdoor toileting, public drunkenness, drug deals and fights in the park.

It was pretty nasty at times, but what we have now is worse. It’s gone from a more-or-less avoidable annoyance to a full-blown every-day-in-your-face crisis downtown.

Meanwhile, the city’s enforcement efforts are an exercise in movement without progress.

The homeless settle in some vacant space, police are called and chase them out. They find another vacant space, police are called again, and the process repeats and repeats and repeats.

Quite honestly, we’ve been treating these human beings like cattle or sheep, allowed to graze a field for a few days at a time and then driven on to the next one.

It’s making everyone miserable and it’s got to stop.

The only glimmer of hope for change I’ve seen was actually at First Church.

In November, about 500 Christians, Jews, Unitarian Universalists and Baha’is gathered there to lay the groundwork for a faith-based coalition to fight homelessness and mental illness on the street.

It’s called “Justice Together,” and at this writing, various committees within the larger group are researching how other places deal with their homeless issues.

Maybe they’ll find something, maybe they won’t. But at least they’re trying.

And they seem to understand something that our local government doesn’t — success would be a process, not a ribbon cutting.

Whatever Justice Together comes up with, it’s bound to be better than what we’re doing now.

Because it’s hard to imagine it getting any worse than threatening Christians for failing to harass the homeless while celebrating the birth of Jesus Christ.